The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [149]
Demon drink
Tomb-raiders know how to take all the best goods. In the basement of one Greek museum sits a beautiful, huge drinking bowl rescued from the illegal antiquities trade. Delicate vines lace around the edge, men lie close to one another, intimate and trusting, but in the centre of the cup is a petrol-blue monster, a Gorgon who grimaces and through her gaping teeth lolls her engorged tongue out at the viewer, at the drinker, the symposiast. Painted close to the year that Socrates died from hemlock poison, the cup is reminding us what horrors excessive love of our fellow men – lulled by wine, by a false sense of security and joint purpose, loose-tongued, seen to be having too good a time – can lead to. Around the symposia foul-breathed rumour pheme would do her withering work, and out of the intense, charged gatherings could come ideas of pure evil.
If Plato was giving us Alcibiades as Athens, then his metaphor was horribly accurate. Alcibiades, beautiful young Alcibiades, had become greedy, bellicose and corrupt. He was driven not by virtue or by nous, but by his primal appetites. The young aristocrat thought he wanted to learn from Socrates, but instead he chose to sway off drunkenly into the night. Like Athens he was drinking, partying, living and dying too hard.
Socrates had seen how easily citizens slid into barbarity; how in hard times men preferred hard talk. His exhortation to his fellow Athenians to moderation, to thinking before leaping, seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
SOCRATES: Then it is impossible to be happy if one is not temperate and good.
ALCIBIADES: Impossible.
SOCRATES: So it is the bad men who are wretched.
ALCIBIADES: Yes, very.
SOCRATES: And hence it is not he who has made himself rich that is relieved of wretchedness, but he who has made himself temperate.
ALCIBIADES: Apparently.10
ACT SEVEN
CUTTING DOWN THE TALLEST CORN
40
MELOS
416 BC
SOCRATES: If you think that by killing people you’ll put a stop to anyone criticising you because you don’t live as you should, you’re not thinking clearly.
Plato, Apology, 39d1
Geography has a lot to answer for. Some territories are blessed, others are burdened with supplying the raw materials of human civilisation. The island of Melos is one such. It is a tiny island whose geological composition has proved both a bonus and a curse.
Ringing the Cyclades, a swirling volcanic archipelago in the heart of the Aegean Sea, Melos has, since the age of prehistory, been civilisation’s paintbox. Geophysical activity means that the rocks weep sulphur, kaolin and gypsum. In the north of the island the beaches are still littered with treacle-black volcanic glass – obsidian – which has been in demand across the known world since the Stone Age. Melos was long on Athens’ radar. Finds at Laurion show that Bronze Age Attic Greeks traded their metals for the razor-sharp knives, the arrowheads, the surgeon’s scalpels that obsidian so usefully becomes. In ancient times Melos’ exports were essential. Now the island thrives on selling barite to force-ripen cherry tomatoes for the global salad market.
Melos is an odd, beautiful, slightly perturbing place. Children digging on the beach find the sand gets hotter and then dangerously hot as they approach the earth’s crust. Steam jets suddenly bubble the skin as one swims in its coves. The world-famous Venus de Milo was found, gawky, half-submerged in a cave covered with unremarkable scrub by a (surprised) farmer hoeing his patch at the beginning of the season in 1820. And today on a deserted hillside site, smothered with wildflowers and droning with diligent bees, massive Doric blocks of stone, dark gore-red, shield human settlements that are no longer there.
This ancient place feels like a ghost town, for good reason.
In 416